Chapter 11 #2
"You're not trying to own me. You're trying to protect me." She meets my eyes across the desk, her gaze steady, the blue darkened by an emotion I can't name. "There's a difference."
I go still. The words land in my chest and stay there, warm and heavy.
"You believe that?"
"I'm starting to." Her voice drops, the words barely above a whisper, and for a moment the negotiator disappears and the woman underneath surfaces. The woman who cried in my arms three days ago. The woman who asked me why I didn't leave.
The moment stretches. Neither of us breathes.
Then she shakes it off, squares her shoulders, and flips to the final page. Her eyes scan the last clause and I watch her face when she reaches the word I've been waiting for.
Freedom.
Upon elimination of the Malone threat, the Protected Party shall be provided with a new identity, financial resources sufficient for independent establishment, and complete freedom from all Syndicate obligations and associations.
"Freedom." She reads the word aloud, slowly, turning each syllable over on her tongue. "That's the end goal? I just... vanish?"
"Isn't that what you want?"
She doesn't answer. Her fingers rest on the page, the pad of her index finger pressing against the word, and her throat works as she swallows. Her lashes dip, hiding whatever storms are gathering behind those blue eyes.
The silence is her answer. And it is enough.
She picks up the pen. Signs her name at the bottom in a decisive, slashing script that matches everything about her.
"There." She sets the pen down and meets my eyes. "We're officially bonded as bodyguard and whatever I am or whatever this is."
"Whatever this is," I repeat.
She stands. Moves around the desk, her skirt shifting against her thighs with every step. I track her the way I always do, predator awareness mapping her trajectory, her speed, the subtle sway of her hips. Except she's never been prey. She's been a predator too, hunting different things.
She stops in front of my chair. Looks down at me with those blue eyes, and the expression on her face is one I haven't seen before. No anger. No fear. No transaction being calculated behind the sharp gaze.
Wanting. Just wanting.
"We should celebrate," she says.
"Celebrate."
"The contract. The deal. The fact that I haven't tried to kill you yet."
"That's a low bar."
"I'm an optimist." She leans down and her lips brush mine, light, testing, the barest whisper of contact. She smells like the coffee we've been drinking all day and the olive oil from lunch and underneath, that honey-musk scent that makes my pulse stutter.
This is different. No anger driving her toward me. No fight preceding this. She's not wielding sex as currency or as a weapon.
She's just... wanting me. And offering that want without armor.
"Are you sure?" The question scrapes out of my throat. I need to know this is real. That she's not playing a game I haven't decoded yet.
"I'm sure I want you." She traces my jaw with her fingertips, her thumb dragging across my lower lip. "Is that enough?"
It shouldn't be. It is.
I grip her hips and pull her down onto my lap.
She comes willingly, straddling me in the leather chair, her skirt riding up her thighs until the fabric bunches at her waist. My palms slide over the bare skin above her knees, calloused fingers against smooth warmth, and the contrast makes us both inhale.
I kiss her. Slow. Thorough. None of the usual warfare. My mouth moves against hers with a patience that surprises us both, my tongue tracing the seam of her lips until she opens for me, her hands fisting in the front of my shirt, pulling me closer.
She rolls her hips against me and I groan into her mouth, my fingers digging into the flesh of her thighs. She does it again, grinding against the hardness straining beneath my trousers, and a breathy moan slips from her lips that sends electricity crackling down my spine.
"Here?" she whispers against my mouth.
"Here."
Her fingers find my belt, working the buckle open with a dexterity that makes me wonder what else those journalist hands are capable of. She frees me from my trousers and her fingers wrap around my length, stroking once, twice, her thumb circling the slick head in a way that makes my hips jerk.
I slide my hand up her thigh and find her panties already damp. I push them aside, my fingers dragging through her slick folds, and she gasps against my lips, her forehead dropping to mine.
"Ready for me already." My voice is gravel. My accent has abandoned any pretense of English pronunciation. "Always ready."
"Don't be smug." But she's smiling against my mouth, a real smile, unguarded and warm.
She rises with my help and positions me at her entrance. For a moment she hovers there, the heat of her barely touching the swollen head of my cock, her eyes locked on mine. Blue on black. No walls. No armor. Just her.
She sinks down onto me with a sigh that sounds like coming home.
The heat of her envelops me inch by inch, tight and wet and gripping, her inner walls stretching to accommodate me with a slow, deliberate patience that makes my fingers curl into the armrests of the chair.
She takes all of me, settles fully in my lap, and the intimacy of being joined this way, face to face, chest to chest, breath to breath, is more devastating than any violence I've survived.
We move together. Unhurried. Her hips rock in slow circles, each rotation grinding her clit against my pelvic bone, each shift tightening her walls around my shaft. My hands grip her waist, guiding but not controlling, letting her set the pace.
Her forehead presses against mine. Eyes open. Watching each other.
"Konstantin." My name falls from her lips, quiet and trembling. Not Beast. Not the sardonic nickname. Konstantin. The full weight of my name in her mouth swells my cock.
"Onyx." I breathe her name against her lips, tasting it, claiming it. "Moy огонёк."
Her rhythm falters, her hips stuttering, her walls clenching around me in a tightening spiral. I grip her hips and angle her forward, pressing deeper, hitting the spot that makes her gasp.
"Right there." She clutches my shoulders, her nails pressing half-moons into my skin through the shirt. "Don't stop. Please, right there."
I hold the angle and let her ride, watching the pleasure build across her features, the flush climbing her chest and throat, her lips parting, her brow furrowing in concentration.
The quiet sounds she makes fill the office, unguarded, unhidden, no longer muffled against my shoulder or bitten back behind clenched teeth.
She lets me hear her, and the trust embedded in that offering undoes me completely.
She comes with my name on her lips. A trembling exhale that vibrates through her body and into mine, her walls pulsing around me in slow, rhythmic waves.
I follow her over. Bury myself deep and let go, my release pouring into her in hot, shuddering pulses. I press my face against her throat and breathe her in, my arms wrapping around her waist, pulling her tight against my chest.
We stay like that. Connected. Breathing. The leather chair creaking softly beneath our combined weight.
"This is getting complicated," she murmurs against my hair.
"Da."
"I don't do complicated."
"Neither do I."
"So what do we do?"
I brush the hair from her face. Tuck it behind her ear. Trace the line of her jaw with my thumb, feeling the warmth of her skin, the steady pulse beneath it.
"We figure it out."
"Together?" The word hovers between us, loaded and terrifying and too fragile to touch.
"Together." I confirm it because she needs to hear it and because the word, once spoken, becomes real.
She kisses me again. Soft. A seal on a promise neither of us meant to make.
That evening, I find her asleep on the couch with her laptop open on her stomach, the screen dark, her breathing deep and even. The light from the kitchen casts a warm glow across her face, erasing the faint worry line between her brows.
I lift the laptop carefully and set it on the coffee table. She stirs, murmurs my name, and resettles.
I sit beside her. Her head finds my lap without waking, as if her body knows where it belongs even when her mind is elsewhere. My fingers thread through her dark hair, untangling the strands, tracing the curve of her ear.
"Kon?"
"Mm." My fingers continue threading through her hair, slow and steady.
"I need to tell you something and I need you to not make it weird."
My hand pauses. "Define weird."
"I forgot my birth control pills at my father's house.
Kind of hard to remember them when on the run, but you know what I mean.
" The words tumble out of her in a rush, graceless and hurried, nothing like the woman who just negotiated a contract with surgical precision.
"I haven't taken one since before the auction.
Which means every single time we've..." She gestures vaguely between us, her cheeks burning crimson from jaw to hairline.
"I'm not protected, is what I am saying.
I haven't been this whole time. I'm sorry.
I should have said something sooner but my brain has been occupied with, you know, not dying. "
She braces. I can see it in the way her shoulders draw up and her jaw tightens, her whole body tensing against my lap, preparing for my reaction. She's expecting panic. Anger. The cold calculation of a man treating an unplanned variable as a threat to be neutralized.
She's not expecting silence.
But that's what I give her, because the truth is, nothing about this confession alarms me. Not a single syllable. The only thing moving through my chest right now is a warmth so deep it borders on primal.
She tilts her head back to look up at me from my lap, her blue eyes searching my face, and the confusion written across her features when she finds no concern there is almost amusing.
Her brow furrows, her lips part, and I watch her brain scrambling to reconcile my lack of reaction with the bombshell she just dropped.
"You don't seem worried about this." She says it slowly, her eyes narrowing, that sharp journalist gaze cataloging my lack of reaction the way she catalogs everything. Filing it. Flagging it. "At all."
"Nyet."
"Kon." She shifts in my lap, turning to face me more fully, disbelief written across every line of her face. "I just told you I've been having unprotected sex with you for over a week and your response is one syllable of Russian indifference?"
"It's not indifference." My thumb traces the shell of her ear, my voice dropping low, the accent thickening around every word because I'm done pretending this doesn't affect me. "It's the opposite of indifference."
I watch the implication settle with her. Her lips part. Her pupils dilate, the blue shrinking around expanding black. The pulse at the base of her throat kicks into a rhythm I can see from here, rapid and hard.
"You want to get me pregnant." Not a question. The journalist has connected the dots and she's staring at the picture they form with an expression caught between terror and a heat she's trying very hard to hide.
"I want you." I hold her gaze, steady, unapologetic. "All of you. Every version of what that means."
"We've known each other for eight days."
"I knew after two."
"That's insane."
"Probably." My mouth curves, and I let her see the satisfaction I'm not bothering to hide.
"And yet here you are. You are laying in my lap.
In my home. Wearing my shirt." I splay my hand across her stomach, warm and heavy and deliberate, letting the gesture carry the weight of every unspoken intention.
Her breath catches, a sharp intake she can't disguise.
"If it happens, it happens. I won't pretend that displeases me. "
She stares at me. Those blue eyes wide, her lips parted, her journalist brain running calculations that keep crashing against the raw, primal simplicity of what I just told her.
This woman who negotiated a contract clause by clause with the precision of a trial lawyer cannot compute a man who wants to put a baby in her after eight days and feels no conflict about it.
"You need to get me my pills." Her voice comes out steady, but the tremor in her fingers where they rest against my chest betrays her. "Tomorrow. Because one of us needs to be rational about this."
"If that's what you want."
"It's what's responsible."
"Responsible." I repeat the word with the faintest edge of amusement, my hand still resting on her stomach, warm and claiming. "Da. I'll get your pills."
I'll buy them. I'll hand them to her. And I won't ask a single time if she's taking them. Because the choice has to be hers. Everything with this woman has to be her choice, or it means nothing.
But the way her fingers curl against my chest, gripping the fabric over my heart, the way her eyes dart to my hand still resting on her stomach and then away, tells me she's not as certain about those pills as she wants me to believe.
She settles back against my lap, her eyes already heavy, the confession spent. Within minutes her breathing deepens and her body goes slack against mine.
The signed contract sits on my desk. Her name in bold, black ink, a promise as binding as any vow spoken aloud.
I look down at her face, soft in sleep, the freckles scattered across her nose barely visible in the low light. The small scar on her left palm catches a sliver of warmth from the kitchen.
I would burn the world for you.
The thought rises unbidden, certain, absolute. Not a threat. A vow.
I've never thought that about anyone. Not once in forty-four years of violence and survival and the carefully maintained isolation that kept me alive.
My fingers gentle in her hair.
It should scare me. It doesn't.